While heading down to Tokyo this morning at the crack of dawn I looked to the east and thought, "Wow....that's beautiful. I can see the sun coming up in front of Mount Tsukuba."

Then I thought a bit more...."Wait a minute....in FRONT of Mount Tsukuba?

When the sun had peeked only about 1/2 or less over the horizon, it looked for all the world like the bottom half was appearing in front of the mountain. I looked several times, and could clearly see the sharp horizon line of the mountain running through the middle of the sun. Must have been some sort of atmospheric lensing effect.

This photo doesn't really show it, but I couldn't choose my time or place; this was taken at the next red light I hit. As anyone who has ever shot sunrise or sunset scenes know, the scene is in a constant state of rapid change and the minute or so it took me to get to the light pretty much killed the effect. Anyway, at such a long distance (about 100km) it is entirely possible that I mistook a low-lying band of dark haze for the mountain.

Pentax K20D
S-M-C Takumar 105/2.8

[Fritz]

That's pretty cool. I have not seen that effect before.

[MRRiley]

I've seen that before and it does look strange. In this photo the sun is clearly behind the cloud to the left but seems to be in front of the cloud to the right...